Chrysler CEO on Oprah, Paul Harvey Super Bowl ads: 'It wasn't easy'

Chrysler Group LLC Chairman and CEO during the announcement inside the former Dime Building, now renamed Chrysler House, April 30.Michael Wayland | MLive.com, file

AUBURN HILLS, MI- Chrysler Group LLC’s two Super Bowl XLVII ads are causing a stir online and throughout the U.S. automotive industry.

Sergio Marchionne, the Auburn Hills-based automaker’s CEO and chairman, said making Super Bowl ads, which this year were for the Jeep and Ram brands, is becoming continually more difficult, as expectations grow.

The second ad, called “Farmer,” was for Ram trucks featured the “So God Made a Farmer” tribute delivered by legendary radio broadcaster Paul Harvey and used as an anthem in grassroots videos created by farm families over the past three decades.

Marchionne told Smith that Chrysler’s management team all watched the ads together with family members.

If you missed the ads, here they are with full transcripts provided by Chrysler:

"Farmer" featuring Paul Harvey:

And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.

Ram YouTube: "Farmer"

God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, and dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks, and shoe scraps. Who planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then, painin ’from tractor back, put in another 72 hours.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark.” So God made a farmer.

It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and brake, and disk, and plow, and plant, and tie the fleece and strain the milk.

Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing. Who would laugh, and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what dad does. So God made a farmer.